Checklist of the bees (Hymenoptera, Apoidea) of New Caledonia

Abstract

In a world where insects and notably bees are declining, assessing their distribution over time and space is crucial to evaluate species status and highlight conservation priorities. However, this can be a daunting task, especially in areas such as tropical oceanic islands where exhaustive samplings over time have been lacking. This is the case in New Caledonia, an archipelago located in the Southwest Pacific. Historical records of bee species are piecemeal, and although contemporary samplings have significantly advanced our knowledge of the bee fauna of New Caledonia, the status of several species remains to be elucidated. Here we provide an updated checklist of the 51 bee species recorded for New Caledonia using previous publications and personal samplings. We documented their distribution, origin (i.e., endemic, native, or alien), and the year and location of their occurrences. Based on the year of their first and last capture, we associated them with an occurrence status. Thus, 10 years after the last checklist of the New Caledonian bee fauna, literature review and recent samplings allowed us to add 6 new species to the list. Half of them are recently introduced species and one is mentionned for the first time in this paper (i.e., Hylaeus albonitens). We consider here that 30 species are effectively present on the territory, and the presence of 21 species could not be determined due to a lack of data, which highlights the need to increase sampling efforts across New Caledonia. Given the difficulty of exhaustively sampling the whole archipelago, we would recommend taking as a starting point altitude environments and areas where data deficient species were captured. In a broader perspective, biomolecular analyses are crucial to confirm species identifications. This is also needed to make comparisons between archipelagos and thus clarify the distribution and status of species at the scale of the Southwest Pacific.